William Mathias

condition (record/cover): NM / EX (cut corner)
Insert included.

A document of rare quality from one of Wales's most significant twentieth-century composers - and an organ recording that stands among the finest the L'Oiseau-Lyre catalogue produced in its distinguished series of British music. William Mathias (1934-1992) came to composition through a formation at the Royal Academy and study with Lennox Berkeley, and brought to his music a combination of Baroque formal rigor, modal harmonic language, and a particular Welsh directness of expression - a refusal of opacity that gives even his most complex writing an immediate communicative force.

The organ was the instrument through which Mathias maintained the most sustained relationship with a living performance tradition: the church and concert hall tradition that gave his music its social context and its acoustic character. Music For Organ is both a showcase for his command of the instrument's resources and a document of what the post-war organ revival in Britain had produced when serious compositional intelligence engaged with it. The playing is exemplary; the recording, made for L'Oiseau-Lyre's characteristically high standard of sonic quality, captures the instrument with presence and depth. L'Oiseau-Lyre, SOL 342.